Abstract Language comprehension involves prediction, but what exactly can comprehenders predict? We ask if bilinguals can consciously predict upcoming code-switches between languages. If predictions focus on a sentence’s message, then listeners should not predict code-switches, which alter the language used but not necessarily the meaning. Alternatively, if listeners predict at many levels—including language—then they may predict code-switches. Here, we selected sentences from a corpus of spontaneous bilingual conversations that started in Spanish and removed the final word that would have continued in Spanish or code-switched to English. In two preregistered experiments, Spanish–English bilinguals heard these sentence fragments and predicted the language of the omitted final word. They successfully predicted upcoming code-switches when given 30 seconds of context prior to their predictions (Experiment 1; N = 94), but not when only hearing the sentence fragment (Experiment 2, N = 115). This shows that bilinguals can predict upcoming code-switches when sufficient conversational cues are available.
Salig et al. (Mon,) studied this question.
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